Agile Development (Theory in practice) : James Shore and Shane Warden

During a trip, I’ve read this book. I think it’s a very good book to start with when you plan to implement agility in your team. Both as a developer or a Product.

Was chatting with a friend of mine some days ago, on the ‘where to start’. Indeed it’s difficult. You may be frighten to introduced agility as a whole, but it’s the best solution. Remove all your usages, challenge your team. But this required both a highly motivated team, and a good Agile/Scrum practitioner to ask for help on a regular basis.

So, I’ll try why I love the book :

Reminder of the agile manifesto … most of the team who plan to move to agile, have read it one day … but it’s a good reminder 🙂

The book addressed different aspect of agility : developers, scrum master (scrum method), product, client …. I’ve seen several team forgetting to quickly that one of the objectives of Agility is to make product and end-user happy. It’s not only about making developers happy.

Among the key tips & trap I’ve read in the book :

Stories : Ensure the team share the product vision, challenge your stories by asking : what’s the value for the customer … I especially love the challenge card game. One card, one idea challenge the feature…. Product should define MMF (minimal marketable feature). During TShirt sizing, product and developers should challenge each other, if product requires a feature complex to implement, sometime he will be happy with an ersatz of the feature, but easy to do. The product should also define, how to test the feature.

Sprint planning : the team (or a team member) should have prepare the sprint planning, he should have understand what the product want, and anticipate most of the technical issues. Define the success criteria of your sprint.

Estimate : time give you idea on how you did mistake on estimation … a team will all the time estimate the same way… (same X% error)

Sprint : remove task as soon as possible (if you have some delay), it will help team working on the most priority one, and will involve product on definition of the new priorities.